My Top 10 Favorite Videos of 2014
Happy New Years' Eve everyone. This is a time of year that's great for reflection, to see what we've done and celebrate the positives and examine the negatives. 2014 has been a far more productive year for me than 2013. I mean, one of the reasons I used to do things like 500 subscriber or 1000 subscriber special reviews is to sort of mark how far I've come, and that 1,000 subscriber milestone was in November... of last year. I've made it to 65,000 at last count. And I do think that's because my videos have gotten better. Not only did I take on things that I'd never dream I'd do when I started (Ren Seeks Help and Mega Babies), but I think that I learned to stand my ground much better. And I'll discuss that as we go along. My earliest video this year was my Bats! review, and the last one was my It's a SpongeBob Christmas review. Any review that came before that doesn't count, and the Elf Bowling review I'm making now doesn't count for this year. Considering the hell I went through watching the movie three fucking times, it'd better make 2015's. I'm not going to present a link to each of the videos. Here, I'm just going to talk about them as a sort of commentary to them, not really about the production of them, but specifically what they mean to me. Why 10 instead of eleven? Eh... I'm lazy. Yeah, one of my New Years Resolutions is to be more productive. Number 10: Animated Atrocities #56: "Staring at the Future" 'I said that the only way I could see people getting enjoyment out of ''Teen Titans Go is in an MST3k kind of way, because I do. Teen Titans Go is so easy to make fun of, and very easy to make fun of. And this was the review where I realized it. Yes, the first episode review of the show. This is the definition of a show that becomes a regular on Animated Atrocities--it maintains a consistent level of badness, but manages to be bad in different ways (failing at the latter is why I'm retiring G3 MLP). Both Friendship and Boys vs. Girls are at roughly the same level of badness, but bad in vastly different ways. Not to mention that Teen Titans Go's type of badness is "Bizarrely bad" which is my favorite kind of bad to review (Tentacolino and Planet Sheen, for example). Each episode is more than just a torture porn, or gross-out from start to finish, and even when they try grossout their animation is too bad to make it work. Reviewing Teen Titans Go is the most fun that I have while doing Animated Atrocities. So yes, expect a lot of Teen Titans Go reviews this year, probably at least once a month. I don't know if all episodes would make a good review, but most of the ones that people are requesting would: Friendship, Boys vs. Girls, Salty Codgers, Ghost Boy, Tower Power, Uncle Jokes, Dreams, Mr. Butt, Pirates, Vegetables, the Mask, the episode where they sing the DuckTales theme. Which one is next? I really want to do Boys Vs. Girls, but considering the season I think Second Christmas might be a good one to do. 'Number 9: Animated Atrocities #71: "Tommy's Big Job" '''On the other end of the spectrum there's Mr. Pickles. I have a very love-to-hate relationship with Teen Titans Go. It's the opposite with grossout shows. They are a slog whenever I get the idea in my head to them, and that's for multiple reasons. How many ways can someone say "that's not funny, that's disgusting" and "you need to put effort into more things than shocking people." I actually know the answer because I said everything there is to say about the sad state that adult cartoons have become in my Tommy's Big Job review. If you're wondering, Mr. Pickles I believe is the worst show to come out in 2014. Yes, it's worse than Breadwinners. I think my best reviews come from things that I wanted to say and an episode gives me an outlet to do so. Like if I get into another one of my Pokemon phases a review on a Pokemon episode would probably be fucking amazing. Speaking of that, I'm thinking of doing a video-game themed month (about video game adaptations to animations) this April. I wanted to say the things that I said to Mr. Pickles to the near-entirety of adult cartoons for a long-ass time. I'm not saying that every adult cartoon needs to explore the deeper aspects and the meanings of life, but they need to realize that there's more to being a "grown-up" than realizing sex exists. It's a very junior-high mentality that creates shows like Mr. Pickles. Keep in mind that the junior high mentality thinks calling other people gay is an insult while being obsessed with drawing dicks on everything. There's more to making an adult cartoon than making other people know you're not afraid to "go there." You need to know when to "go there." I'll still review gross-out shows and adult cartoons in the vein of Mr. Pickles here, but they're not going to be frequent and quite frankly I don't know if they're going to be as good. Eh, there's still Family Guy. I actually have the script for ''Herpe the Love Sore completed. I just want to get a soldier's perspective on the ending. 'Number 8: Animated Atrocities #46: "Cars 2" '''Chances are, if I review a movie, it's going to be on one of these lists. Movie reviews are some of my best reviews, largely because they're not very frequent. I do them for special occasions, or a once in a while thing. That's one reason why I tend to go back and forth a lot on which movie is next to review. I mean my Equestria Girls review was one of my favorites for a long time, and I don't think that a Rainbow Rocks review will top it in either criticism or humor, but you never know. Hunchback II? Some of the best catharsis I've ever gotten doing this. Tentacolino? My favorite review of last year. Princess Promenade? My favorite G3 review. Another reason I don't review movies often is that they can be a bitch to do. Cars 2, I needed to find several different programs to rip the movie and the one I found only barely worked. The reason for this is that though ripping CD's, DVD's etc, is totally legal (you bought it, you can do what you want with it), the companies are paranoid of piracy so they use very high-class software that's incredibly difficult to crack. You generally won't get this on older DVD's, or DVD's from lower-key companies (which is why Cars 2 was the first movie I had this problem with), but a movie from this decade owned by Disney needs a really tough program. The editing was tedious, as my software was very uncooperative. After 13 hours of editing, it didn't want to process it, so I had to start editing all over again in 10 minute chunks (10 minutes of the movie, not the review). And do you know what? I think it was worth it. You see, most of the time when Disney fails they fail in the perfect spot: something that's bad enough to be critiqued harshly but not bad enough to be totally unwatchable. That is a really fun experience when reviewing something. Not to mention that the choices of this movie were just baffling. Who thought that creatures that feed off of oil should be pushing an environmental message? What did spies have to do with this!? I just know that I'm not going to have as much fun reviewing either of the ''Planes movies. 'Number 7: MLP Review: "Twilight's Kingdom" '''Chances are, if I've got a controversial review, it's going to be one of my favorites. The only exception is probably my ''Spit Collector review. It's not that I don't like that review, it's just that it's another gross out show. I do believe that if I didn't do the rhyming thing the review would have been worse with me saying the same old thing. At least now it stands out in some way. It was a pretty good year for Friendship is Magic this year, right? We've got a really good movie, and a really good season with only a couple of duds there. But I'm getting off topic. One thing I've learned about myself is that I hate staying silent when there's something that I think needs to be addressed. It's something that I've done all of my life, and this year it finally changed. Well, technically it started last year. My Magical Mystery Cure review may have been the inception of it, but this is the full realization of it. A strange sensation happened to me. It went for it to be hard for me to speak up to being harder for me not to. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. In some regards it's a bit of both, and I'm going to have to find a happy medium in 2015. It's become hard for me to say silent when I see perceived wrong-doing, even if I'm wrong in my judgement. And there are times when I'll be wrong, but that's my deal, and I don't think that I was in the wrong here. it's very hard to describe my feelings towards this review because my feelings are complicated and the issues that surround it are now really distant. What this review means to me though, is that this was the first time in my life that I ever spoke my mind completely and without hesitation. When I started, I was shy, bashful, fearful of offending people, had stage fright, was paranoid about people learning anything about who I was and in making this review I realized that none of those traits existed anymore. These were the traits that had crippled my life in many areas, and pigeonholed me into many things I didn't want to be. 'Number 6: Animated Atrocities #37 "Chicken Little" '''Sometimes it's good to let out a little bit of rage, and I let out more than a little here, so being this angry at a movie must be really fucking good. My ''Chicken Little review may be the angriest I've ever gotten in a review. This is because the morality about parenting is so convoluted and back-ass it falls into an uncanny valley where you don't know if they're being serious or joking. It's the kind of place Seahorse Seashell Party found itself, Stuck in the Wringer and it may be my least favorite aspect of everything ever. It leads to horrible, horrible things. The main problem with Ren Seeks Help is that you never knew whether they were joking or being serious. They did tell jokes about the parenting thing "You should listen to your kids, even when they have nothing to say" but the main moral just confuses things. Was I projecting here..... yeah, a little bit. Eh, parents are a funny thing. Except when they're not. Honestly for me to project fully I'd have to see myself in Chicken Little's place, and I really didn't. But yeah, there was something going on in the old past with this review. It seems that people know this because the people that tend to have a problem with the anger in some of my videos didn't have it here because it felt justified. And when I was blowing out my throat it felt justified to me too. Barring maybe some propaganda from World War II I still think that this is the worst product that Disney has made and it felt so good to give the thrashing to it. 'Number 5: Animated Atrocities #45 "Love Loaf" '''Mr. Pickles and Breadwinners both have a few things in common, most prominently, both make me sad. Not counting Nick Jr. shows, Breadwinners was the only new cartoon to air on Nick in 2014 But we'll have more time to talk about that soon. Breadwinners is a show made of pandering. Most episodes obviously aren't stupid enough to have their main characters try and date rape someone, but it's all grossout and all protagonist-centered morality on... less than stellar individuals. I wondered why Nick wanted this show, but then I found out that it may have been made specifically to pander to Nick. Let's put something in perspective here. While Nick took Breadwinners from YouTube, Cartoon Network aired Over the Garden Wall. When I reviewed this, I was filled with what I thought is rage. But as time has passed it's more like despair. Considering I can't seem to talk about this episode on its own, let's move on to number 4. '''Number 4: Admirable Animation #22 "3 Tales of What Could Have Been" '''The second part of this two-parter. Well, both ''Fart Baby ''and ''Cold War were in Nickelodeon month, but this review and Love Loaf are the ones that this series was remembered for. I could keep going on with the crap that Nick has done in the recent years, but it's just not worth it. They really don't care. I mean, I make this whole series pointing out their problems and they go ahead and move Legend of Korra to the internet because... reasons. Most of me thinks that it's Viacom doing this, and Nick isn't doing this of their own volition. I mean Viacom is the company that decided music doesn't belong on MTV for crying out loud. And Viacom's buy-out is roughly when Nickelodeon started going downhill. I mean there are shows I had to cut out of Nickelodeon month. Like, let's put the adult cartoon Glenn Martin DDS, the show with a running gag about a dog having a giant anus right after a showing of Spongebob. Giving Shamalyan complete control over the Last Airbender movie, and not giving the creators of the show any. And then executive meddling even further (like casting their relatives). It would take me two more "Nick months" to review the shows I missed, like Rabbids Invasion, Rugrats Pre-School Daze, or Mr. Meaty (it's an official Nicktoon, so I'm counting it as "animated.") I made this series of videos because I believed that it's not too late for them to change, and I still believe that. They do have a few cartoons in production, so it's still a chance, but we'll have to see. 'Number 3: Animated Atrocities #55 "Shorty McShorts Shorts" '''Let's stop being depressing! So, there's a lot to talk about with this review. Let's start with... how fun it was to review. Like Cars 2, it falls into the perfect area of bad. It's bad enough to be disliked, but not so bad as to be unwatchable. Considering that altogether, the 13 episodes is about an hour longer. Not something you'd expect to come from me spur of the moment. But this is what can happen when inspiration hits. And this is one of the things that had me very inspired to do a review, like many of the things I reviewed when I was just starting out. Not to mention that the editing in this review is the best I've ever done. Okay, let's get to the obvious: this review was essentially the spark for what was ''Growing Around. Well, sort of. I mean, yes, Flip-Flopped was definitely an inspiration but I might have been working on Growing Around whether or not I reviewed Shorty McShorts' Shorts. But looking back, it's actually unlikely, since how I worded things. This means that this review is responsible for giving me a goal in life, helping me meet awesome new friends, and is possibly even going to give me a future beyond reviewing. If we get Growing Around on TV, then this no contest will be my magnum opus review. Oh and for the people joking about me reviewing an episode of Growing Around on either admirable animation or animated atrocities (at least I hope you're joking), the answer is no. I can't even mention anything about Growing Around in a review because I can't be relatively objective about it. Also, there's conflict of interest, etc. Back to the ''Shorty ''review. Like my Top 20 Opening Themes list, it just has an awesome flow to it, which is hard for me to get right. I do tend to dwell on points for longer than I need to, but not here. Everything is as long as it needs to be. '''Number 2: Animated Atrocities #40: "Top 10 Worst Squidward Torture Porns" If it isn't my most viewed video! Honestly view count doesn't matter that much to me. I never review something specifically to get views. Even requests are kind of iffy. For example, Are You Happy Now is probably one of my lesser reviews this year. I really only took that one on because so many people were clamoring for me to do it. Not to mention that it probably falls into the House Fancy effect. If the suicide jokes weren't in the episode I probably wouldn't have reviewed it at all. As for this list, and the Patrick list, it allowed me to get several episodes that I really wanted to talk about out of the way right quick. They also let me knock out two of the season 5 shorts. I don't know how I'm going to tackle the other shorts, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. Yeah, this list was actually very convenient for me to do. I mean, if I didn't do something like this I'd have to make a review for Good Neighbors and then a separate review for its clone Cephalopod Lodge. It also helped me get a good grasp on what made Breath of Fresh Squidward so bad. Also with this list, there was no nagging reminder of my dead dog. But lessons are learned, only name your pets after characters in shows that are no longer running. But... then they'll make a reboot that could make Teen Titans Go blush. Number 1: Admirable Animation #31: "Troll - Shane Koyczan" I'm going to get some flack for this, but this is my favorite video to date. The only reason I'm a little hesitant to say this is because I made it so recently, but I'm proud for every little bit of this video. Almost every word choice, and the message. The only improvement I think I could have made is clarify what I meant when I said "this taught me there is evil in the world." You see, for the most part murdering people and stealing from them is frowned upon in most societies. However, doxxing people, sending them death threats a thousand times a day, that's apparently funny. While people started doing what I complained about to coerce me into thinking that what I said was wrong, new surfaced about another 19-year-old, Adam Smith, killed himself due to common everyday trolling. He was a brony. He had a learning disability, which are both common targets for trolling. He made a video apologizing to his trolls, which is still on YouTube. The troll comments telling him to kill himself are still there, as are some of them that say they're glad he's gone. This person I'm assuming they've never even met. If there is a line between bullying and trolling, I still don't see it. This video is my favorite video I've made because it's the one I think most needed to be said. Oh by the way, I'm not even kidding--people are trying to troll me to coerce me that I was wrong in my opinions about trolling. It's... not going to work. Let's have a happy new year people. Let's make 2015 better than 2014. Category:Top Tens